How Faulty Logic Causes Havoc In Your Life

January 23rd, 2008 by admin in Thinking

A lack of awareness of the fundamental problems with commonly used logic and the assumptions behind it causes a lot of misconception and hence problems. This article details this and gives you a better logic to adopt. This article is 700 words long and will take about 3 to 4-minutes to read.

The Power of Words
We all of us have a great problem that many of us have little awareness of. We use words to describe our world and to make conclusions about our world. We rely upon words so instinctively and without question that we easily disregard the fact that our words only symbolize reality, they do not equal reality. We use words as a form of shorthand to take notes about reality and in doing so we discount a lot of other sensory and experiential information. Words act as a useful filter but when we forget (or don’t even question) what they filter out and instead accept them as facts in themselves, as opposed to the actual factual events and occurrences that they symbolize, then we start to get a lot of problems. We lose our attachment to reality and without that we lose proper sense and perspective and become deranged in some form or another.

When we forget that words act only as symbols (not the object itself) and then build rules of logic to guide our interpretations and conclusions of things we hamper ourselves. We build these faults into our daily thinking and we create great limitations. More than that we create impossibility for ourselves because we attempt to make the world fit our simplistic and inaccurate (if not wholly wrong) interpretation of it and when that doesn’t work we often have to indulge in lies and conceit to maintain our self-deception. Such is the power of language over humans. A tool that freed us from the limited consciousness of all other animals can also recoil against us drive us crazy because we don’t know how to use it properly.

Common Logic
About 2300 years ago Aristotle identified the common logic used by people. He discovered that most people act, talk, feel, believe and live as though three fundamental rules of logic apply:
Rule 1: The Law of Identity - A is A, by which we mean man is man, or truth is truth.
Rule 2: The Law of the Excluded Middle - Anything is either A or non-A, by which we mean that anything is either a man or it is not a man, anything is either true or it is not true.
Rule 3: The Law of Non-Contradiction - Something cannot be both A and non-A, by which we mean something cannot be both a man and not a man, something cannot be true and not true.

Absolute Limitations
These are the basic laws of thought for most people. This logic forms the construct in which people shape their thoughts, feelings and responses. These laws that Aristotle identified became mistakenly interpreted as laws of nature and ended up employed without question or revision for millennia. It imposed a way of thinking that gave overriding priority to creating absolute conditions. Something is absolute when it is all A and not something else in any way, shape or form. To make this correct for most things that we encounter we end up forced to discount masses of real and experiential data and information, i.e. we corrupt our ability to respond accurately to the real world through our obligation to make the law true. In doing so we go crazy.

The Neurotic Personality
People who have a lot of mental and emotional problems tend to take an absolute “A is A” attitude to the things that they desire, such as ‘success,’ or ‘wealth,’ or ‘happiness,’ or whatever else they pursue. They then automatically conclude that “something either is A or it is not A” and so they exclude all possibilities that lie within the extremes. They interpret themselves as either ‘an absolute success,’ or as ‘an absolute failure.’ They exclude the possibility of states of being where some success and some failure can occur, or where some wealth and some poverty can occur.

When we seek things that we do not describe accurately or else impose impossible constraints upon (as the common laws of logic ensure) then we either never achieve them or else never know if we have achieved them (and hence feel continuously unfulfilled and experience negative emotions as a result).

The follow up article will describe some of the antidotes to common logic problems and describe more about the common assumptions and hence resultant problems of our over-reliance upon words.

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